Misadventure 6 - Red Velvet Cookies

Hera here again, another solo misadventure as I'm going to be baking for my work's cookie exchange. This is another first trial for the recipe.  Today's recipe is brought to you by Taste of Home website. 

From www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/red-velvet-cookies

Here we go...

Some revisions: I will be using a mixture of chocolate chips (1 ½ cups of milk chocolate chips and ½ cups of dark chocolate chips) and reducing the sugar to ½ cup because there will be frosting on these.  I will also be using butter instead of shortening.  I don't have buttermilk and the store ran out, so I will be using a substitute.  For 1 cup of buttermilk = 1 cup of milk + 1 ¾ tsp cream of tartar, mix well and you just leave it out for about five minutes.

Pretty standard beginning, creaming the butter and adding the yolks.

Then we can add the food colouring (the healthy alternative is adding grounded cooked beets or beet juice, surprisingly, you do not taste the beet at all).

When mixing (after adding the flour mixture and buttermilk), it became super thick like a soft dough.  Super hard to mix with a hand mixer so I had to resort to mixing by hand.  I suspect it may not have mixed well.

Here comes the egg whites.

After I added the stiff peaked egg whites, it was very difficult to fold because it was basically mixing a dough with something super foamy.  The dough was super dense and it was hard to just "fold" lightly to get it all incorporated.  I had to break the golden rule of "folding lightly with egg whites" just to get it all together.  I ended up mixing very vigorously to get it all blended.  At times, the dough and egg whites were separated.

It took a while (about a good 5 minutes at least), but it's finally mixed.  I'm worried that it may get tough from the over-mixing.

Now we just need to wait 12 - 14 minutes while it's cooking in the oven.

It's not exactly the red that I see in the picture, but it's a shade of red at least?  Let's see how it tastes?

The chocolate chips definitely helps, but it tastes like raw flour.  I was looking at the comments while it was baking and a lot of comments also agreed that this recipe called for too much flour.  I will most likely cut at least 1 cup of flour next time I make these.  My friend also tasted this, and she thinks the frosting will help drown out the flour-iness.

I ran out of frosting so I had to do the zig-zag patterns.  The recipe also called for crumbling 8 cookies to sprinkle as decoration, but I'm short on cookies.  The cookies were bigger than anticipated, so I got 72 cookies (6 dozen) instead.  Even after adding the frosting, it didn't really look very festive, so I decided to add in some candy cane sprinkles.

These sprinkles were really big and they're a little hard and not much sweetness at all.

Final Thoughts: These were at least edible, but they're definitely not very high on my list taste-wise.  The chocolate and frosting did help with the flour-iness and the cookie was still soft on the inside.  I was worried about the over-mixing because the dough before adding the egg whites was do dense, dry and thick.  Luckily it was not the case.  This recipe can definitely use some improvement, but it's a good try for something with a red velvet theme.

RECIPE FROM TASTE OF HOME (www.tasteofhome.com)

RED VELVET COOKIES

Yield: 7 ½  dozen

Ingredients:

1 cup shortening

1 cup sugar

¾ packed brown sugar

3 eggs (separated)

2 tsp red food colouring

4 cups all-purpose flour

3 Tbsp baking cocoa

3 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

1 cup buttermilk (I used 1 cup milk + 1 ¾ tsp cream of tartar as substitute)

2 cups (12 oz) semisweet chocolate chips

Frosting:

1 ½  cups butter, softened

3 ¾ cups confectioners' sugar

¹_/8  tsp salt

3 to 4 Tbsp 2% milk

1) In a large bowl, cream the shortening and sugars until light and fluffy.  Beat in egg yolks and food colouring.

2) Combine the flour, cocoa, baking powder and salt. Add to the creamed mixture alternately with buttermilk, beating well after each addition.

3) In another bowl with clean beaters, beat egg whites until stiff peaks form, fold into batter.  Fold in chocolate chips.

4) Drop by tablespoonfuls 2 in apart onto greased baking sheets.  Bake at 350°F for 12 - 14 minutes until set.  Remove to wire racks to cool completely.

5) In a large bowl, beat the butter, confectioners' sugar and salt until blended.  Add enough milk to achieve desired consistency.  Crumble eight cookies and set aside.

6) Frost remaining cookies; sprinkle with cookie crumbs.  Store in an airtight container or freeze for up to  month.